


in the day i am denied

by ascience



Category: Football RPF, Men's Football RPF, Sports RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, FC Bayern München, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-10
Updated: 2019-04-10
Packaged: 2020-01-11 02:57:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,743
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18421395
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ascience/pseuds/ascience
Summary: Boa loses his power, Mats thinks it's pretty funny - and Lewy meddles.(AU - Football players with superpowers)





	in the day i am denied

**Author's Note:**

> Long time no see. Wow, the FC Bayern content is strong in this account currently. I vow to improve.  
> Anyway, this fic is part of the same universe as [this one](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8210681). The title is from [Use Me](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjeF-9SqzX4) by the Goo Goo Dolls.

Boa doesn’t notice anything wrong at first. He forgets to take his restriction wristbands off about as much as he forgets to put them on, so he doesn’t realise when he’s not hearing any thoughts for a couple of days.

He only notices it when he tackles Lewy in training, unnecessarily risky perhaps, but no reason for him to get as pissed as he does.

But Lewy, in one of his testier moods, scrambles to get up and wipe the grass off his shorts, then he gets all up in Boa’s face about it.

“The fuck!” he says and squares his shoulders which infuriates and amuses Boa at the same time.

“Relax,” Boa says. Out of the corner of his eyes, he can already see Rafinha slowly close in, no doubt ready to step between the two of them.

They’ve been here, obviously - that is to say, they’ve had their share of heated fights without winners, seeming huge and serious in the moment, then forgotten the next day.

Boa doesn’t even know what Lewy is aiming it anymore. It made sense when they were enemies, but then Lewy transferred and he still keeps getting tempers, his power flaring up. Boa retaliates because, well, he’s not going to bow to a _striker._

Despite Rafinha - bless his heart - hesitantly tugging at his jersey, Lewy doesn’t back down. Or relax. Boa telling him to predictably only makes him snarl.

“Don’t fucking tackle _me_ ,” Lewy says like it’s an affront to all mankind.

Boa snorts, then he stills, focusing on the furrowed lines on Lewy’s forehead.

Lewy’s thoughts barely ever make sense when he’s angry, Boa has found. The words and pictures get muddled, the Polish doesn’t translate at all anymore, but Boa still listens in when they fight, even though he’s usually a big fan of minding his own business.

No matter how many times he listens, he has yet to grasp what’s going on inside Lewy’s head, especially his reasons to snap at times.

This time, when Boa tries to read Lewy’s mind, he can’t even catch the usual unintelligible flickers.

He looks into Lewy’s angrily squinting eyes, listens and there is - nothing.

Boa’s right hand automatically jumps to his left wrist to open the wristband, but his fingers search for it without success. Boa looks down, and the wristband isn’t there, neither on the left nor on the right.

He focuses on Lewy again, straining his ears, and still - nothing.

All other sounds seem magnified compared to the powerless silence. Boa can hear Lewy breathe heavily, and the chafe of synthetic fabric on synthetic fabric of his jersey is unpleasantly loud.

No thoughts.

Huh.

Boa has been staring for a long time now. He can tell that Lewy knows he’s using his power ( _trying_ to use his power) because Lewy pulls back out of Boa’s space. There’s more annoyance on his face than anger now.

“I bet you’ll regret it if you don’t apologize,” Lewy says, an obvious attempt at a tit for tat in terms of powers. It’s still working on Boa, his hand raising to shake on the bet on its own before he can force it back down.

“Yeah. Whatever.” Boa tries for nonchalance and takes a couple of steps back, looking back and forth between the other guys that are watching from a safe distance. He can’t hear their thoughts either, not even a whisper.

Lewy kicks the ground once and throws Boa another irritated glance, before quickly looking away, as if remembering his thoughts are theoretically on display for Boa. Then he trots back into position for the five-a-side, cooling down slightly slower than he heated up.

They kick off again, and Boa sets off to run for the ball, but suddenly he feels like he’s been put behind a glass wall. The silence didn’t bother him when he wasn’t aware of it, when he unknowingly must have put it down to his wristband.

Now, however, it sounds cold and empty.

Boa tries to remember the last time he read someone’s mind, which must have been a week ago when he found Leon crying into his elbow in a random supply closet. A _week_ ago.

He thinks he put on the wristband straight afterwards, but isn’t sure. Neither can he say when he last took the wristband off, and he curses himself for always handling it so carelessly.

Boa tries not to think about whether this loss of power could mean something seriously bad or whether he might lose it for even longer, but it _could_ and he _might_ , so he can’t brush it aside.

And he does like to think of himself as sensible, so he checks with the medical staff as soon as he can after training.

He’s met with blank faces. Perhaps they’re as blank as always, and he’s just noticing the lack of background noise of thoughts.

“It’s not really my profession, you see,” the doctor says. “I’m a trauma surgeon.”

“That’s not helpful.”

“I’m sorry. But physically you’re fine, it doesn’t affect your playing and a power skip won’t kill you. It’s very probably going to come back.”

“It’s never happened to me before like this.”

“Then you’ve been lucky.”

Boa takes off his glasses and rubs a hand across his eyes. “So that’s it? Wait it out?”

“Pretty much.”

Unsatisfied, Boa leaves the doctor - and it doesn’t get much better when he runs into Lewy outside of the room.

At least Lewy seems to be in a much more agreeable mood now, too friendly almost. Unless he’s having medical problems, too, he’s almost certainly waited here just to see Boa.

Boa nods at him and tries to escape with long strides, but Lewy is quick to follow.

“What’s wrong?” Lewy asks.

“Nothing.”

“You met with the doctor.”

“So I did.”

“So there’s something wrong.”

Boa groans. “Lewandowski, what’s it to you?”

“It’s nothing bad, is it?”

“If I say yes, will you leave?”

Lewy raises his eyebrows and slows down in response, no longer keeping up. Boa badly wants to hear what he’s thinking, but it’s like trying to see somebody’s eyes through mirrored sunglasses, in vain.

“Didn’t want to bother you, man,” Lewy says. “Just wanted to be nice.”

Boa laughs incredulously and doesn’t stop walking.

 

 

 

He gets through the rest of the day without despairing, mostly because he expects for everything to have sorted itself out when he wakes up the next day.

It hasn’t.

It was unlikely in the first place, considering his power must have been gone for the better part of a week. Weirdly enough, Boa wouldn’t have guessed how much he’d miss it, but he catches himself trying to stare into people, where he usually wouldn’t have bothered when he could actually still read minds.

It’s no help that Mats, who otherwise has proven to be as emphatic as a truck on a field of daisies, picks up on Boa’s problem quickly.

“What’s eating you?” he asks in the gym, occupying one of the machines next to Boa’s exercise bike, but actually just lazily scrolling through his phone.

“Hm?”

“I’ve been thinking _very_ loudly for the past half an hour and you haven’t told me off once. Is there something wrong?”

“What were you thinking about?” Boa asks, which makes Mats look up from his phone and cock his head. “I can’t tell, okay.”

“What?”

“I can’t read your mind. Anyone’s mind.”

Mats’ eyes flicker to Boa’s wrists and his mouth forms a surprised ‘O’. Of course Boa can see the gleeful gloat in it. “A power skip? Since when?”

“Couple of days. Does it suck? Yes. When is it coming back? I don’t know. Thank you, press conference over.”

Mats laughs. “Not quite out of puberty, are you?”

“Shut up,” Boa says and pushes the setting buttons on his bike in irritation. “This has never happened to me before.”

“I was just taking the piss, Boa. You’ve _never_ had your power give out?”

Boa shakes his head and pedals against the new uphill setting. “Well. Yeah, when I was _fifteen_! And before the World Cup final, I think. But it lasted less than a day, not like… this.”

“It’s not all bad,” Mats says and grins. “This means I can rate Instagram girls in my head all day and you’ll never know.”

Boa pulls a face. “You just told me.”

“This seriously bothers you, huh?”

“Doesn’t it bother you when it happens?”

“Sure. But you can’t force it back. It’s like any injury. What do you do with a stretched ligament?”

“Oh, come on.”

“No, seriously, what do you do?” Mats asks and Boa has the feeling he’s getting taught a lesson here. By Mats. He’s disgusted.

“Rest,” he says reluctantly. “And when it’s healed, slowly increase training.”

“Exactly.”

Boa stops pedalling and thinks about it. He hates to admit it, but Mats has a point, somewhere in the labyrinth of his ever cocksure thoughts. He doesn’t like the fact of being without his power, he doubts anyone would, but he’s never relied on it and has enjoyed his own self-determined breaks from it with the wristbands.

“Hey, it’s going to be fine,” Mats says and moves to pat Boa’s shoulder supportively.

Boa almost accepts it, but then dodges Mats’ hand in the last moment. “Oh, hell no. Don’t.”

Mats pulls back his hand and feigns ignorance. “Please. I wouldn’t.”

“You wouldn’t? You have. You _have_ used your power on me like this. What are you even trying to do? You’ve already persuaded me. I’m going to take it slow.”

“Fine. I see my expert help isn’t appreciated,” Mats says huffily, shoves his phone in his pocket and starts to walk towards the exit of the gym. Boa can’t make himself refrain from calling after him.

“When God distributed the powers, he should have given you speed.”

Mats shows Boa his middle finger over his shoulder and says, “Go fuck yourself,” without turning around.

Almost another super power, one of Mats’ defining qualities is that he can’t keep his fucking mouth shut. If Boa had to estimate, he’d probably say it’s twenty-one hours until all of Bayern (the club, but maybe also the state) knows about his problem. Twenty-four hours later, the erectile dysfunction jokes are already repeating themselves.

Boa realises that his power skip wouldn’t be much of a big deal if he wasn’t making such an issue out of it for himself, but he still doesn’t think it’s enough of a reason for all the others to offer him unsolicited advice.

“Can you tell what I’m thinking?” David asks him in the locker room, his head resting in his hand and his elbow on his crossed legs.

Boa wishes he could kill a man with a look. He doesn’t reply and shuts out the jibes, just stoically pulls up his socks and puts his boots on.

“You know, OBJ had it for almost a season once.”

The end of the sentence piques Boa’s interest after all. “Wait - again. Who?”

“Beckham.”

“David Beckham?”

“What?” David vehemently shakes his head. “No. Odell. You know, the _other_ football.”

“Oh, OBJ, right. Your mate. What’s his power?”

“He can pull things towards him. Sort of directional telekinesis, I suppose.”

“Things?”

“Objects. And people.” David gets a slight smile on his face that almost turns Boa grateful that he can’t read the thoughts behind it.

“Do I want to know?” Boa asks.

“It’s not relevant to _your_ problem.”

“How did he fix it then?”

David waves his hand. “No idea. Just came back or something. How would I know? I dunno how this power shit works. Sorry.”

“A season is really bloody long,” Boa ponders and tries not to count the days in his head.

Apart from David, there’s Javi who seems to have no clue what’s going on, there’s Manuel who makes a quick exit whenever someone wants him as a captain to have an opinion about it - and there’s Lewy who, surprisingly, barely mocks Boa at all.

“Is that why you were at the doctor’s?” he asks.

Boa shrugs, then nods.

“It wasn’t our fight the other day, was it?”

 _You were the one doing the fighting_ , Boa thinks and says, “Don’t flatter yourself, Lewandowski.”

“Did you overexert yourself? Maybe that did it. I had that once.”

Boa thinks back to the last time he remembers reading anyone’s thoughts, so to Leon in the supply closet, but that hardly qualifies as overexertion when Leon had spilled all his worries about Serge and Joshua almost by himself.

He briefly wonders how that had played out since Leon hasn’t said anything about it, but there’s a light, strangely persistent rain outside that answers the question for Leon.

Boa shakes his head. “I think it’s one of those things that just happen, no reason.”

“I could try to help it along,” Lewy says and wiggles his fingers as if revving up his power. “We could bet on it and make it more probable.”

“I’d rather you wouldn’t meddle with it.” Boa pauses. “I’d rather everyone shut up about it and get back to football, if I’m being completely honest.”

 

 

 

Boa wants to put his wristbands on to combat the feeling of his skin being bare somehow, but he’s left them at home since they’re not actually of any use right now. He rubs his wrists together awkwardly instead, which doesn’t help at all. At least everyone has the decency to focus on their job during training.

Mats catches up to Boa afterwards, though, and asks, “So, who are you going to practice getting your power back with?”

“ _Practice_. Like I’m twelve. I need that like a hole in my head.”

Mats makes a disapproving noise. “You said I’ve persuaded you!”

“Yeah, to wait until it comes back.” Boa sighs. “Why are you so invested?”

“Uh, because you’re being really annoying, for one. You keep staring at people like you want to spoon their eyes out which is slightly horrifying.”

Boa hadn’t realised, but that _is_ probably what it looks like when he listens and stares for too long and too intensely, automatically waiting for the sound of thoughts before remembering it’s never going to come.

He opens his mouth to reply to Mats, but he’s interrupted.

“You can practice with me.”

It’s Lewy butting into their conversation, having snuck up from god-knows-where.

Boa immediately laughs, high-pitched, and turns to Mats for confirmation of how hysterical that is, but Mats, the bastard, throws him a look that says, _Sounds like a You problem to me,_ shoulders his bag and slips away past Lewy.

“I’m serious,” Lewy continues, and there’s something young and curious in his voice that stumps Boa.

He likes Lewy. He likes him in the convoluted type of way you can like someone whose guts you used to hate on a professional basis. But they’ve never been the kind of friends to share the personal details of their powers, so yeah, Boa is hesitant to accept Lewy’s offer.

“Why do you want to help me?” he asks, at which Lewy shrugs.

“I mean, it’s kind of relevant, right?”

“What do you mean?”

Lewy raises his eyebrows at that, like it’s a particularly stupid question. “The team needs you. We need your power.”

Boa needs a couple of seconds to rewind Lewy’s words in his head before he catches on.

“Wait,” he says and holds up his hand. “You think my power is-- Lewa, I can hear jack-shit in the stadium. Like, at home there are seventy-five thousand people in there, going mad, and you think I can pick out a _single_ cohesive thought from someone who doesn't concentrate on it?”

A frown wanders across Lewy’s face.

“You never read minds when we play?”

“Not really, no.”

“Oh.”

Boa tries not to have an eye-spooning-out look on his face as he figures out what Lewy might mean with that ‘Oh’. Lewy’s slight squint tells him he’s failing.

“Basically,” Boa says, “I cannot see whatever genius counter-attack step-over cut-inside strike you’re planning during a match, if that’s what you’re asking. I never have.”

“That explains some things,” Lewy says and grins, which is not the reaction Boa would have expected, but he’ll take it.

“Look, whether or not I have my ability doesn’t matter for our matches, so you don’t need to be worried about that. Have a good day, I guess.”

Lewy steps into Boa’s way before Boa can even move. “I still want to help you.”

“I’m not sure that’s-- it’s nice of you, but I’m not sure it’s the best idea.”

“You’re not going to find anyone else who’s willing to let you read their mind like that,” Lewy says and Boa has to admit he has a point.

And that is precisely how Lewy ends up in Boa’s Munich flat, standing in front of the shelves full of sneakers with his hands in his pockets.

Lewy looks at the shoes one by one, slides the doors in front of them open and closed. It feels weirdly intimate having him stand there, especially with his thoughts being a black box. Boa knows Lewy doesn't even care about the whole sneaker thing much.

After some long moments, Lewy picks up a shoe for the first time, turns it in his hands with only slight apparent interest and asks, “What am I supposed to think about?”

“This exercise is kind of pointless if I decide for you beforehand, isn’t it,” Boa answers.

“True,” Lewy admits, scans the rows of shoes again, and asks, “Which one am I thinking of?”

“Seriously?”

“Why not?”

Boa fails to come up with a good way of explaining why it’s incredibly stupid, so instead he actually gives it some serious thought. “The Adidas Futurecraft 4D ones.”

“I have no idea what that means.”

“The mint green ones up there.”

“Ah. No.”

A moment of silence follows before Boa clears his throat and says, “We have to do this a different way.”

Lewy nods and puts the sneaker he was holding back in his place on the shelf.

“Agreed. You have way too many pairs of shoes.”

They end up sitting down on the carpet face to face because it seems like the most spiritual (Lewy’s word, not Boa’s) way to do this, but there’s no point at which it stops feeling silly.

“Do your magic,” Lewy says and closes his eyes. He sits there cross-legged and just waits which Boa supposes is relaxing if you’re not the one who has to do the work.

Boa automatically closes his eyes, too, because it seems appropriate, although it doesn’t particularly help his power.

He tries to listen the way he usually does, tries to see the images and words flicker by before he’d pick out the interesting ones. He realises soon that there’s nothing he can grasp at all, which isn’t too surprising at this point. Inadvertently, his concentration catches on all the noises he _can_ actually hear. The empty static of the air, the occasional traffic sound from outside, both of their breathing.

Boa cracks open his eyes and tries reading Lewy’s mind again, but ends up just staring at his face. The lines on his face have mostly smoothed out and his droopy eyelid evened out with the eyes closed. It’s uncharacteristic for Lewy to be so quiet and relaxed, passively waiting instead of taking action. Boa finds himself relishing it with only the smallest bit of spite.

He glances at his watch. Barely seven minutes have passed, but they feel like they’ve been stretched into an hour. He needs way more time for his power to get back than a one time practice, he knows this now.

“That’s probably enough for today,” Boa says and pushes himself up from the carpet.

Lewy blinks up at him. “Did you hear what I was thinking about?”

“No. Still nothing.” Boa is afraid of the slight chance he might sound weepy, so he adds, “Which was to be expected.”

“You don’t want to try any longer? It was like, what, five minutes?”

“Yeah, no, I just don’t think it’s going to help today.”

“Fair enough,” Lewy says and gets up as well now. “So. Until next time, I guess. If you want.”

“I do,” Boa says, surprisingly himself. Lewy seems genuinely delighted at that, even if he tries to hide it, so whatever they’ve got going on here, it appears to be mutually beneficial at least. “I mean, actually, I was going to ask whether you wanted to stay for a drink or something.”

“A drink? Like friends?”

Boa rolls his eyes. “Don’t ruin it, Lewandowski.”

Lewy accepts the offer, so Boa gets them each a bottle of alcohol-free beer and they spend some time chatting about sneakers that Lewy has no clue about.

Like friends, Boa supposes.

Boa’s dry spell, if you want to call his power skip that (as David gleefully does), continues. Weirdly enough, it might be making him more observant where he usually would have been in the blinders of Minding His Own Business.

For one, the frequent rain has stopped. That, and Leon and Serge are whispering to each other quite often, a couple of steps away from the rest of the team. Every so often, Serge shows Leon something between his curled palms, and Boa has to assume that Serge is growing flowers for him.

So whether or not Leon has told Serge about what Boa found him crying about in the closet - Leon seems happy. Where Joshua fits in this, Boa does not want to think about.

The other thing Boa notices is that Lewy grins at him often. Not even when they’re exchanging looks, but when Boa says something during match prep meetings or when he’s working one of the exercise machines in the gym or when Lewy could start a fight with him in training, but doesn’t.

Lewy also grins when they meet up for practice, but he tries to tone it down when face to face, to give him credit.

Their meetings drag, because for the longest time there’s no progress. Boa realises that if you boiled it down, they’ve been meeting up so Boa could stare at Lewy for some minutes.

When Boa’s power comes back, it comes back the same way it disappeared - without warning. The difference is that Boa is there to notice it when it happens.

The feeling is strange, like leaning against a door that you assume to be closed because it has been for some time, and then falling through it without resistance.

“Oh!” Boa calls out, and he’s so surprised that he heard a thought coming from Lewy that he grabs Lewy’s arm impulsively.

Lewy flinches and the thought slips through Boa’s fingers again, but it doesn’t matter much now that he’s heard it once.

“What?” Lewy asks expectantly.

“My power is back. Sort of. I don’t know.” Boa listens again -- nothing. He might be too distracted. “I definitely read your mind, but it’s gone again now.”

“What did you see?”

“It’s-- I think it was one of the iPads we do match analysis on. Clips playing on it. Fuzzy, though.”

Lewy’s brows slightly knit together. “Oh, okay.”

“Is that not what you were thinking about?”

“Not that I know, no. But they did have some clips for me to watch today. It might have still been on my mind somewhere. ”

“I’m _certain_ I saw something.” Boa realises with an awkward jolt that he’s still holding Lewy’s arm. He retracts his hand which puts another one of the grins on Lewy’s face. “I have to try again. Can you try thinking about something… I don’t know how to phrase it. Something big. Something emotional. Something loud.”

Lewy cocks his head as if he doesn’t quite understand, but suddenly there’s a flicker of a thought and Boa is so unprepared for it that he barely manages to catch it before it’s gone again.

It’s a visual thought, colourful but blurred like a dream, not a memory. Whether it’s so fuzzy because Boa’s power is still lacking or because Lewy imagines it like that, Boa can’t tell. It flickers by with the speed of a subconscious idea, repressed before you’d be aware of it.

It’s from Lewy’s point of view, obviously, and the image is mostly taken up by a man looming over him as Lewy is backing him against a wall.

The guys’ face is in shadows and blurs, as is the rest of the dream scenery, but Boa is still too fucking sure that it’s his own face.

At first Boa thinks this is some sort of threatening situation, like the many fights they’ve engaged in in reality - until, in the thought, his back hits the wall and Lewy lifts his thigh just _so_. Boa can feel the background excitement in Lewy running along with it. It’s too obvious to read it wrong.

It’s arousal.

Lewy still has his head cocked, eyes turned away and probably wondering which thought to feed Boa. He doesn’t know what Boa just saw, maybe he doesn’t even know that he thought it at all.

Boa is stunned into silence for a moment, can’t quite decide what to do, can’t decide whether he should acknowledge what he saw. He rubs his wrist together, then he speaks up.

“Actually, never mind,” he says in a voice that sounds stilted to his own ears. Boa hesitates for a moment as Lewy turns towards him again. “I think we can stop for today.”

Lewy raises his eyebrows. “Really? After this break-through?”

“I, uh, I don’t want to overdo it. Overexert, you know.”

Lewy doesn’t seem to buy the smile that Boa forces on his face, but he can hardly force Boa to do anything, so he exits eventually, leaving Boa behind puzzled.

That night, Boa lies awake listening to his own thoughts. They are filled with Lewy’s thoughts anyway, bad copies of the image Boa saw in Lewy’s mind pass again and again, getting grainier with each repeat.

It leaves a hot curl in the pit of Boa’s stomach, intrusive in more ways than one.

Boa thinks about Lewy’s fantasy. A lot. It’s like for every minute that this has never crossed his mind before, he’s overthinking it twice now. The trouble is that it’s not such a different situation from all the times they’ve butted heads, literally forehead to forehead, to fight or to celebrate, and Boa’s mind has no problem merging the two scenarios hitchlessly.

He likes Lewy. He likes him in the convoluted type of way you can only like someone whom you’re afraid to like a little bit more.

 

 

 

Boa’s power is not quite back to the quality it was before, still jitters on and off uncontrollably, muffled and aimless sometimes, but it feels good nonetheless. Whole.

He packs his wristbands when he heads to training, but doesn’t put them on. He figures he deserves to give himself this, to hear everyone’s thoughts drip in as background noise simply because he can again.

Soon enough, the senseless babble will annoy him and he’ll long for restriction, but for now there seems to be no sweeter sound than the mix of languages in the training facility.

What happened with Lewy obviously still bothers Boa, but he doesn’t see why he can’t share the good part of the news anyway.

“My power is back. It’s starting to come back at least,” Boa says and it almost touches him to hear Mats think genuinely happily about it.

“See, I told you that you just need a little patience. Lewy really worked his magic there, huh.”

It’s not a question, just one of Mats’ stupid little remarks, but Boa’s affirmative noise in reply still falls flat.

“Oh no,” Mats says, sounding intrigued, “there’s a story there, isn’t there?”

“Might be.”

When Boa doesn’t keep talking after that and tries to sit it out, Mats slowly raises his hand and might have been able to use his power if Boa hadn’t heard him think it from a mile away.

Boa shuffles away just far enough to be out of Mats’ reach. “Dude, stop. You’re horrible, you know that, right?”

“Yes,” Mats says and grins.

Boa sighs. “I’ve seen... something in Lewy’s mind that I’ve never heard him think about before.”

“He’s killed someone.” Mats’ reply comes quick and sounds so matter-of-fact that Boa does a double-take.

“What?”

Mats shrugs. “So that’s not it? Huh. Figured we’d finally have something on him. He’s hiding something, I’ve been saying that even back in Dortmund.”

 _Close enough_ , Boa thinks. “He’s thinking thoughts about me,” he says.

“Thoughts. Okay, I’m not following.”

“Thoughts about me _and him_. You know. _You know what I mean_.”

When Mats gets it, he makes a noise somewhere between a cough and a strangled dog.

“I mean, I understand, we’re blokes,” Boa continues as calmly as he can. “Sometimes you think about each other in that way. It’s natural. Hell, I guess I’ve had inappropriate thoughts about Lewandowski before. We’ve all done that.”

Mats grimaces, clearly having his own opinion on that, but not voicing it.

“What?” Boa asks.

“When you say we’ve _all_ done that--”

Boa knows how that sentence ends without Mats saying it. He’s been ignoring the hot curl in his chest that equals the one in his stomach, too busy to rewind Lewy’s thoughts to read his own.

Mats gently continues, “I just don’t think that’s entirely true,” at the same time as Boa says, “Oh Christ.”

“Need a second?”

“A year maybe.” Boa takes a deep, slow breath and lets it out again, then he shakes his head. “No, I’m okay. I’m fine. Feel free to ask, by the way, I can hear you think the question anyway and it’s making me crazy.”

“I was just wondering, like, would you set the scene for me? You’re both in your flat, you go, ‘I’m going to read your mind now’--” Mats does a truly terrible impression of Boa’s eye-spoon look. “-- and Robert fucking Lewandowski just starts thinking about railing you hard right there and then?”

“It wasn’t like that,” Boa says and thinks, _Kind of_. Mats grins.

“So what now?”

Good question. Boa has his power back, and what Lewy had offered in words was to help him achieve that. Victory all around, basically. It just doesn’t feel like anything has been solved at all.

“I don’t know,” Boa answers.

“May I offer my insight on your situation?”

“I have a choice?”

“You know, I’ve turned this problem over in my mind and thought about all the possible problems and solutions entangled with it and have arrived at the following result.” Mats makes a significant pause. “I actually have no clue how to help you. If only there was some way to read Lewy’s mind... oh, wait!”

Boa is not impressed.

He doesn’t go out looking for the depth of Lewy’s thoughts, even as he sits next to him at lunch, because it feels wrong to do it to him while he’s unsuspectingly grinning at Boa. It’s unfair to take what Lewy doesn’t offer.

The possibility that Lewy _would_ offer if asked is there, but scary, and Boa doesn’t know how to strike up the conversation with Lewy on that particular topic, so he mostly doesn’t do it. Doesn’t do it at all, in fact.

He tells Lewy he doesn’t need practice anymore, which is true, and Lewy nods and looks neither happy nor disappointed when Boa thanks him.

There’s quite a margin of emotions still left between those two options, but Boa has never been Philipp Lahm, and it’s not the type of the thing he likes to consider at length.

In time for their next league match, Boa’s power is still impaired, so the sounds in the stadium are muffled and far away, but _there_ below the chants and music and chatter that are for everyone to hear.

The group thought vibrates in the stadium, like a subdued _Bayern, Bayern, Bayern_ bouncing between the stands in call and response, like only hearing the baseline extracted from a song.

Boa almost regrets how seldomly he lets himself hear it, usually shutting it out during matches as to not be distracted.

He turns to Mats as they wait for the blow of the whistle and asks in awe, “Can you hear that?”

It’s a stupid question - of course Mats can hear the fans, but he can’t _hear_ the fans, not like _this_. But Boa wants to share his emotion somehow, and he knows that Mats gets it when he rolls his eyes, but smiles in reply.

There’s an echo in Boa’s head then, the words _Can you hear that?_ reverberating in a voice that’s not his own. The source of the words is obvious enough by the accent so Boa turns until he can see it.

Lewy is looking at him with a furrowed brow, in concentration to make sure to get his thought across, using Boa’s open searching for thought and the relative quietness before kick-off to make himself heard.

 _Can you hear that?_ He almost certainly means himself and not the stadium, but the question behind it is the same.

Boa nods at Lewy, jerkily so it shows across the distance, and a nasty grin spreads across Lewy’s face.

A series of images runs by then, impossible for Boa to catch in their entirety. He gets the gist though -- Lewy’s idea of a smooth run into the penalty box, a flash of Lewy’s power, the ball hitting the net in a beautiful curve past the keeper’s fingertips.

If Boa could, if this was not a one-way street, he’d send back images of himself and an opposing player and a tackle not unlike the one that provoked Lewy at the start of all this.

With the way it is, Boa just huffs and nods again.

When they do score (Lewy’s goal, but an ugly tap-in, not the finesse Lewy projected), a wave sloshes through the minds down on the pitch and up in the stands that almost makes Boa dizzy, even in the dimmed version of his somewhat mended power. Somewhere in the stands there are ultras that made it through the entrance without power checks, conjuring up fire and red smoke.

Lewy does his stupid celebration where he crosses his arms and sticks his tongue out and Boa realises that he hates that he’s halfway down the pitch, that he wishes him closer. Close enough to _hear_.

Part of the crowd around Lewy are Joshua, Leon and Serge, each one tangled up in the others’ limbs. There’s something about observing their orbits around each other that tips Boa over.

Occasionally, apparently, things work out.

 

 

 

Boa spends some time agonizing over how to set up a situation where he can tell Lewy, talk to him, ask him everything he needs to ask, but in the end Lewy unknowingly takes it out of his hands.

He invites Boa for dinner and drinks at his place and adds, “Like friends,” with a slight tug at the corner of his mouth.

Lewy doesn’t own a wall of sneakers (or anything else that seems half-interesting at first glance), but Boa wouldn’t have spent time looking at them anyway.

“Can I ask you something?” Boa hesitates to settle his full weight on Lewy’s couch, to get too comfortable so he sits on the edge of it. He realises he should have prepared a speech, but now that he’s started without a sheet of notes, he’ll have to go through with it.

“Sure.”

“Do you-- Did you want me to hear it?” Boa asks, channeling all his nervousness into his fingers sliding across the seams of the couch. “Is that why you offered to practice with me?”

“Hear what?” Lewy laughs.

Boa makes a helpless gesture, only says, “About you and me”, but Lewy figures it out anyway.

They’re his thoughts after all.

Lewy says, “Oh,” and then nothing for a very long time. Still, to Boa’s surprise he doesn’t sound shocked or apologetic. He sounds defeated at most.

“If you want me to forget--”

Lewy cuts him off. “No. I didn’t want you to hear it. I mean, you never have. Before.”

“Before?”

“Ever,” Lewy answers, which could mean anything and everything, but mostly: Lewy’s thoughts, they’re not new. They’re serious, even, judging by the time he must have spent holding onto them.

A tumble of Polish pours through Lewy’s mind, as unreadable as always. It’s followed by a scene showing Boa from a low point of view looking up. He’s panting, throwing his head back, white hands roaming across his bare chest.

It’s too intimate to hear it now, like taking the second step before having taken the first. Boa quenches the agitation rising up in him and shoves his hand into his pocket.

“I can’t,” he says, “I cannot do this.”

Lewy’s face falls until he sees that Boa is simply trying to get out his wristband.

Boa fumbles to unknot the band, and then he fumbles to close the clasps around his wrists. Silence with a snap.

“Sorry.”

Boa shakes his head. “It’s not usually that loud.”

“You’re not usually listening so hard,” Lewy counters, and it’s like he’s tugging right at the vulnerable heart of the issue.

Boa takes his glasses off, rubs across his eyes, put his glasses on again and doesn’t see much clearer.

“Just. Are you serious? Is this serious? Or is that just something that you… think about to, whatever, pass the time?”

“ _Pass the time_ ,” Lewy repeats and laughs to himself like it’s the funniest thing Boa has ever said. Then he sits down next to Boa, on the edge just like him, eyes flickering across his face. He reaches for the band on Boa’s wrist and pull at it a little. His fingers linger there, brushing Boa’s skin, as Lewy says, “I can show you.”

Hysterically, Boa thinks back to Mats saying, _Robert fucking Lewandowski just starts thinking about railing you hard right there and then?_ , and can’t quite add up how they managed to end up here from him experiencing his power skip. He looks into Lewy’s eyes and nods.

The touch of Lewy flicking open the wristband’s fastening barely registers as a flood of impressions rushes in on Boa.

There’s words, there’s sounds, the heartbeat of a stadium, an R’n’B song, but most of all there’s images.

Details of Boa’s face, as if looking into a magnifying mirror, but liking what you see, his tattoos, the sneaker wall in his flat, a spray of grass during Boa’s tackle. Their power practices but from Lewy’s point of view, Boa’s face screwed up in concentration, but in a yellow glow your brain puts on good memories. Slipped in scenes that have Lewy clad in Dortmund yellow or Polish white, and Boa still always at center. Lewy and Boa forehead to forehead breathing each other in, their knees bumping during a team meeting -- and a heavy, soft emotion that Boa knows the name of because he feels it, too.

Boa covers Lewy’s hand on his wristband with his own and pushes so the clasp clicks shut again under both their fingers.

Then he hauls Lewy in with his other hand, with more force than necessary because Lewy falls forward easily. He kisses him desperately, and the hot ball in his chest uncurls into something warm and pliable.

Lewy opens his mouth against Boa’s lips, a wet and incredible feeling, and slides his hand out from under Boa’s to rest it on Boa’s side above his hip. He leans forward even further then, and with a sudden push Boa’s shoulders hit the back of the couch, which is followed by Lewy swinging one leg over Boa’s lap. Boa’s breath hitches and Lewy breaks away from their kiss.

“I can hear you think,” Lewy says, and a surprised squeak escapes from Boa’s throat that he barely manages to turn into a suitable cough.

“ _What?_ ”

“Figuratively,” Lewy clarifies quickly. Right. Of course. “I can tell you’re thinking about something.”

Boa looks at Lewy incredulously, at the vanishingly small amount of space left between their chests and back at Lewy. “So guess.”

Lewy snorts, then he grins. He leans in and mouths against Boa’s jaw, and Boa can feel his fingers wiggling at his side.

“I bet you I can figure it out.”

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on [tumblr](http://lahmly.tumblr.com/) or [twitter](https://twitter.com/kissthecrest).


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